Welcome to Penn Medicine's Office of Inclusion and Diversity

Lasting commitment is born of genuine appreciation for that which we aspire to be. Penn Medicine’s commitment to inclusion and diversity is more than words echoing our evolving society; it is a commitment backed by actions that are the foundation of our eminence, core values, and the strategic priorities that drive how we discover, educate, and serve the world.

Penn Medicine’s five-year strategic plan 2013-2017, Shaping the Future of Medicine, defined our priorities; one of which was the creation of the Office of Inclusion and Diversity. Our efforts are aimed at supporting the many innovative programs underway, as well as exploring new opportunities to embrace diversity and broaden access to people of all ethnicities, historical traditions and economic backgrounds, genders, religions and disabilities, and respecting sexual orientation and veteran status. I urge you to visit our site often and let us share in this commitment with you.

BLOG: Conversations About Inclusion and Diversity

While the focus recently has been on the twitter phrase, “black lives matter,” as a physician it is important to underscore the premise that all lives matter. Understandably, the amplitude of voices has increased over the past several months following the tragic deaths of unarmed black men – staunch reminders that implicit bias has had a role in shaping our country, our politics, and our hearts since the birth of our nation.

Spotlight

MLK Health Equity Symposium

As the Perelman School of Medicine celebrates its 250th anniversary, experts in health policy, Veterans’ health, LGBT health, child health, and global women’s health will engage in a dialogue with the university community about strategies to achieve health equity over the next 250 years. Click here to view event details.

Gender Diversity Science

Here we present the first empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that a gender-heterogeneous problem-solving team generally produced journal articles perceived to be higher quality by peers than a team comprised of highly-performing individuals of the same gender. Although women were historically underrepresented as principal investigators of working groups, their frequency as PIs at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis is now comparable to the national frequencies...

"From the Desk of Penn Faculty…"

Gregory McGriff is an Ivy league-trained internist who was once dismissed from a patient's room because McGriff is black. McGriff went on to relate a different incident in which a patient complained that he was “uppity,” having used terminology that the patient did not understand. McGriff’s narrative brought to mind an occasion when I cared for an elderly member of the Ku Klux Klan.